The Axial Age and Its Consequences 9780674070431

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The Axial Age and Its Consequences

The Axial Age and Its Consequences Edited by

Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

•

2012

Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Axial Age and its consequences / edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas. p. cm. Rev. papers delivered at a conference held July 3–5, 2008 at the University of Erfurt. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 06649- 6 (alk. paper) 1. Civilization, Ancient— Congresses. 2. Comparative civilization— Congresses. 3. Philosophy, Comparative—Congresses. 4. Religions—Congresses. I. Bellah, Robert Neelly, 1927– II. Joas, Hans, 1948– CB311.A885 2012 930—dc23 2012008329

To the memory of Karl Jaspers

Contents

Introduction

1

robert n. bellah and hans joas

Fundamental Questions 1. The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse

9

hans joas

2. What Was the Axial Revolution?

30

charles taylor

3. An Evolutionary Approach to Culture: Implications for the Study of the Axial Age

47

merlin donald

4. Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency: Anthropological Features of the Axial Age

77

matthias jung

5. The Axial Age in Global History: Cultural Crystallizations and Societal Transformations

102

björn wittrock

6. The Buddha’s Meditative Trance: Visionary Knowledge, Aphoristic Thinking, and Axial Age Rationality in Early Buddhism

126

gananath obeyesekere

7. The Idea of Transcendence ingolf u. dalferth

146

Contents

viii

A Comparative Perspective 8. Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular Modernity in Bellah’s Theory of Religious Evolution

191

josé casanova

9. Where Do Axial Commitments Reside? Problems in Thinking about the African Case

222

ann swidler

10. The Axial Age Theory: A Challenge to Historism or an Explanatory Device of Civilization Analysis? With a Look at the Normative Discourse in Axial Age China

248

heiner roetz

Destructive Possibilities? 11. The Axial Conundrum between Transcendental Visions and Vicissitudes of Their Institutionalizations: Constructive and Destructive Possibilities

277

shmuel n. eisenstadt

12. Axial Religions and the Problem of Violence

294

david martin

13. Righteous Rebels: When, Where, and Why?

317

w. g. runciman

Reevaluations 14. Rehistoricizing the Axial Age

337

johann p. arnason

15. Cultural Memory and the Myth of the Axial Age jan assmann

366

Contents

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Perspectives on the Future 16. The Axial Invention of Education and Today’s Global Knowledge Culture

411

william m. sullivan

17. The Future of Transcendence: A Sociological Agenda

430

richard madsen

18. The Heritage of the Axial Age: Resource or Burden?

447

robert n. bellah

Bibliography: Works on the Axial Age Contributors Index

469 539 543

The Axial Age and Its Consequences

Introduction robert n. bellah and hans joas

The notion that in significant parts of Eurasia the middle centuries of the first millennium bce mark a significant transition in human cultural history, and that this period can be referred to as the Axial Age, has become widely, but not universally, accepted. Since the very term “Axial Age” is unfamiliar to many, we may begin with a brief explication of it. It has become common to refer to certain texts in literature, philosophy, and even theology as “classics,” that is, as enduring subjects of interpretation, commentary, and argument that make them, whenever they were fi rst composed, contemporary and part of the common heritage of educated people in our now cosmopolitan world. But if we ask when do the first classics appear, the answer is in the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. The canonical Hebrew prophets, Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, among others; the central texts of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle in particular; the early texts of Chinese thought, the Analects of Confucius and the Daodejing (perhaps the most frequently translated text in the world); and early Indian texts such as the Bhagavadgita, and the teachings of the Buddha in the Pali Canon: these and others from the same period can be cited. We refer to these as texts, for that is how we know them, but many of them were composed orally and were not written down for some time. This fact, together with the fact that writing was in use in several areas in the third and second millennia bce, indicates that it was not writing as such that led to the creation of “classics,” though writing was essential for their later dissemination. It was Karl Jaspers who thought that the appearance of these classics at the beginning of several major living traditions in the world justified the term “Axial Age” to describe the period in which they appeared. Hans Joas in his chapter describes the reasons Jaspers gave for this choice of terminology and the history

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Introduction

of earlier attempts to understand the contemporaneous emergence of these traditions. By seeing the Axial Age as the period of the emergence of formative traditions of religious and philosophical thought, traditions that have been greatly elaborated subsequently without the original formulations being left behind, the contributors to this volume are not implying that culture began in the Axial Age and that what went before it can be ignored. It is true that there are no classics in the sense defined above that precede the first millennium bce. The tale of Gilgamesh might be cited as an exception, though it has only marginally entered the canon of world literature, but if so, it is the exception that proves the rule. Nevertheless, the Axial Age is only intelligible in terms of what went before it: a very long and very significant history in which human culture did emerge as a way of relating to the world shared by no other animal. The chapters in this volume are revised versions of papers presented at a conference on “The Axial Age and Its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present” held at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt in Germany on July 3 to 5, 2008. The chapters on the Axial Age in Robert Bellah’s then work in progress Religion in Human Evolution1 were distributed to the participants in the Erfurt Conference not as the focus of the conference itself, but only as a stimulus to which the participants could react or which they could ignore as they chose. It is, however, worth noting that these are the last four of eight substantive chapters in Bellah’s book, and that they are preceded by chapters on the deep biological evolution of capacities that would make religion possible once our species had evolved; on religion among largely egalitarian tribal peoples; religion among chiefdoms, that is, early hierarchical societies; and religion in the great Bronze Age monarchies of the third and second millennia bce: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. Bellah’s book ends with the Axial Age and is much more concerned with its background than its consequences. So, while our conference from the beginning contemplated including papers dealing with consequences of the Axial Age right up to the present, Bellah, though he alludes briefly to some of those consequences in the final chapter of his book, is there mainly concerned with the Axial Age itself in relation to what preceded it. The editors left the matter of whether contributors would write about the Axial Age, its background, or its consequences entirely up to the contributors.

Introduction

3

The evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald has profoundly influenced Bellah’s work on religion in human evolution, and it is Donald’s chapter in this book that goes most deeply into the background without which the Axial Age is unintelligible. Donald has traced the evolution of human culture through four stages, with the first, episodic culture, being shared with other higher mammals. Distinctly human culture begins with mimetic culture in which meanings were expressed through bodily actions and gestures and language was absent or only incipient, and then goes on to mythical culture where full human language allowed narratives to arise and myth to form the focus of cultural organization. The fourth cultural capacity arose with the emergence of theoretic culture in the Axial Age, giving the possibility of universalizable discourse, but not replacing any earlier cultural form. In Donald’s scheme each form of culture is reorganized with the emergence of successive capacities, but not abandoned. The details of Donald’s position can be found in his chapter, but it is worth quoting from it in summary as to the relation between the various capacities: This notion, that every stage of human cognitive evolution found a permanent home in the evolving collective system, is somewhat similar to the evolutionary principle of conservation of previous gains. Previous successful adaptations remained in the system where they proved themselves effective, and the system slowly became more robust and capable of surviving almost any major blow. This occurred without changing the basic facts of human biology, or the existential dilemma facing every human being. The modern mind reflects this fact. It is a complex mix of mimetic, mythic, and theoretic elements. Art, ritual, and music reflect the continuation of the mimetic dimension of culture in modern life. The narratives of the great religious books reflect the mythic dimension, as do the many secular myths of modern society. These two great domains—the mimetic and the mythic—are mandatory, hard-wired, and extremely subtle and powerful ways of thinking. They cannot be matched by analytic thought for intuitive speed, complexity, and shrewdness. They will continue to be crucially important in the future, because they reside in innate capacities without which human beings could not function.

4

Introduction

In close relationship to Donald’s work, the German philosopher Matthias Jung focuses on another aspect of the Axial Age: semiotic transcendence. For him—and one could say that this idea had already been adumbrated by Ernst Cassirer in his philosophy of symbolic forms, particularly in his way of distinguishing between myth and religion—the characteristic feature of the Axial Age is the recognition of symbolicity as symbolicity, the understanding of symbolic signs as pointing to a meaning that can never be fully exhausted by these signs. Jung connects this point with the debates in contemporary philosophy of language and hints at the complex consequences this insight has for our understanding of cultural evolution. Although several chapters in this book refer to periods earlier than the Axial Age, it is Jan Assmann’s chapter that deals most extensively with a pre-Axial culture, that of ancient Egypt. His chapter usefully reminds us of the richness of thought and reflection in ancient Egypt, the degree to which it anticipated elements of Axial culture, and its significant contribution to Axial developments in ancient Israel and Greece.2 Similar arguments could be made about ancient Mesopotamian contributions to Israel and Greece and second-millennium bce Chinese contributions to developments in China in the second half of the first millennium bce. A deeper understanding of the roots of the Axial revolution in the immediate past of the Axial societies as well as in the deep past of human culture is a problem that is in need of continuous research and rethinking, a problem that this book can only raise in hopes of stimulating further work. A number of chapters in the book help us to better understand the Axial Age itself, or to raise questions about it. Charles Taylor provides a useful overview of the Axial cultures and focuses on the emergence of the idea of an unqualified good around which the other aspects of Axial culture can be understood. Johann Arnason and Björn Wittrock in different ways suggest the importance of close historical understanding of each case and an awareness of profound differences as well as similarities among them, each suggesting a “pluralist” rather than a homogenizing approach to the cultures denoted as axial. Two essays provide deep and novel insight into particular Axial cultures, that of Heiner Roetz on Axial Age China and that of Gananath Obeyesekere on early Buddhism. Roetz gives a close reading of tendencies toward universal ethics in Axial Age China, but he insists on holding a high standard in terms of which vari-

Introduction

5

ous tendencies can be so evaluated. This leads him to the conclusion that in the case of China, and by implication the other Axial cases as well, the universalization of ethics was incomplete, with the possibility of regression to more particularistic ethics left open. For Roetz the Axial Age, rather than being celebrated for its particular achievements, should be a challenge to us to overcome its failures in the long-term quest of a truly universal human ethic. Obeyesekere, with respect to early Buddhism, takes almost an opposite approach. He suggests that our modern notion of the theoretic, what he calls “conceptualism,” though found in Axial India, is inadequate as an exclusive way of understanding what was happening. He emphasizes the presence of visionary experience and aphoristic thinking as moving beyond purely rational thought, though with universalizing consequences. Ingolf Dalferth’s essay is the only one that was commissioned after the conference. Reviewers suggested that, since “transcendence” is such a central term in Jaspers’ conception of the Axial Age, a chapter on this idea would be helpful. Dalferth begins by explicating Jaspers’ conception and gives the philosophical background upon which Jaspers drew. He then offers a contrasting theological conception of transcendence that is helpful in understanding the Abrahamic, particularly Christian, use of the term, but which would have less applicability to other Axial traditions. Quite a few chapters in this book take a perspective from the Axial Age and then follow out implications for later ages, in some cases even for the present. W. G. Runciman asks why, if universal ethics has implications for politics, what he calls “righteous rebels” arise in so few and so particular situations. José Casanova asks whether our present preoccupation with the “religious-secular binary” has roots in the Axial Age and what we can learn from such an inquiry. David Martin raises the question of religious violence and the degree to which Axial religions have contributed to it. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt suggests the profound ambivalence of the Axial heritage, from which both constructive and destructive consequences have emerged. William Sullivan contrasts the Axial invention of education as a kind of ethical/ spiritual formation with current ideas of education in advanced modern societies and suggests that we still have much to learn from earlier understandings. Ann Swidler uses her work in contemporary Africa to suggest that pre-Axial and Axial cultures are still in tension in many parts of the

6

Introduction

world and that the problems raised in the Axial traditions are live issues in much of the world. Richard Madsen has tackled one of Jaspers’ most unsettling questions: Is it possible that we have entered a new Axial Age? Is the world of globalized culture where no single tradition can be sealed off against all the others the possible seedbed of new forms of cultural and religious innovation? He uses his extensive knowledge of recent developments in Asian religions to illustrate the questions he asks. We have decided that detailed outlines of the chapters contained in this book would be redundant in this introduction. We have merely tried to suggest the riches that these chapters provide, including some of the tensions between them. Using our brief comments and the chapter titles, the reader can decide how to navigate the volume and discover what a diverse and distinguished group of scholars has to offer. The bibliography provides the reader with the opportunity to delve deeper into the large body of literature on the Axial Age. It does not simply comprise the references cited in the book, but lists as primary sources those formulations of the “Axial Age” concept that precede Jaspers’ famous 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, as well as the extensive secondary literature that Jaspers inspired. Joas and Bellah in the opening and concluding chapters of the book suggest that the question of the Axial Age is not just academic: the deep selfunderstanding of educated people of all the world’s cultures is at stake. The Axial Age was a moment of great religious creativity; no one can seriously think about it without some response to the issues raised in that fertile period. How we think about the Axial Age is to some extent how we think about ourselves and the human project at this perilous moment in history.

Notes We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Christian Scherer, who has not only compiled the bibliography to this volume, but also been of invaluable assistance in the whole process of preparing this volume for publication. 1. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). 2. For more detail the reader is referred to Assmann’s comprehensive book The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), which is a translation of Ägypten: Eine Sinngeschichte (Munich: Hanser, 1996).

Fundamental Questions

1 The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse hans joas

It is an undisputed fact that Karl Jaspers invented the term “Axial Age” in his 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, but it is also uncontested that the basic idea behind the new term is much older and was not first developed by Jaspers himself. While these facts seem to be clear, the same cannot be said about the exact meaning of the concept of an Axial Age, the origins of the term, and the origins of the idea behind it. In the following, I will offer some material that could help to clarify these three matters, but the main purpose of this chapter is not a contribution to conceptual history. These reflections are only necessary as a presupposition for my main argument. I will argue that the Axial Age debate of the last decades is not only one of the most important developments in the area of the comparativehistorical social sciences, but also a religious discourse—a series of highly complex attempts of intellectuals to position themselves with regard to the problem of “transcendence,” its role in history, and viable forms of its articulation in the present. But let me first briefly return to the question of the origin of Jaspers’ idea and concept. For all readers familiar with Georg Simmel’s last book Lebensanschauung, the term “axis” would seem to have been inspired by him, because in Simmel we find the idea of an “axial rotation” as the crucial step in the genesis of ideal validities.1 Love, according to Simmel, may have been induced by corporeal impulses, but when the original desire has led to the formation of intense personal relationships, then these relationships take on their own independent existence and become the source of demands and norms. What Simmel means by “axial rotation” is the genesis of autonomous

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forms of culture that, although being a product of life-processes, now have a retroactive effect on these processes of life themselves. Religion for Simmel is the most perfect rotation around the forms which life produces in itself. The leading American expert on Simmel, Donald Levine, has speculatively claimed that Simmel’s idea is the origin of Jaspers’ expression.2 But this seems to me to be not really plausible since Jaspers does not have the autonomy of cultural products in mind when he speaks of an axial turn, but the “axis” of world history—the one point in history that allows a dichotomous distinction between everything that came before or after it. Moreover, Jaspers himself does not refer to Simmel in the relevant passage, but to Hegel. He saw Hegel as the last great representative of a long tradition of Occidental thinking about history for which since Augustine there was no doubt that the self-revelatory acts of God constitute the decisive turning points in world history. He indirectly quotes Hegel,3 for whom the birth of Christ was the crucial dividing line, the axis of world history. For Jaspers, writing after World War II, such a Christo-centric claim was no longer acceptable and had to be replaced by an empirically tenable and universally acceptable alternative. The problem with his reference to Hegel is, however, that no such passage has so far been detected in Hegel’s entire work. What comes closest to it is a passage in his lectures on the philosophy of history in which Hegel calls the idea of the trinity of God the decisive principle—“the axis on which the History of the World turns. This is the goal and starting point of History.”4 While these sentences may sound like the source of Jaspers’ book title, the problem with the whole quotation is that Hegel in the German original does not use the word “axis,” but “Angel”—a word that is normally translated as “hinge” or “pivot.” Could it be that Jaspers’ confusion of “Achse” and “Angel” is the origin of the term we all use today? More interesting than this whole philological question, however, is the problem of the intellectual origin of the idea itself. Here Jaspers was indubitably influenced by the writings of Max Weber, his brother Alfred Weber, and through them by Weber’s close colleague and longtime friend Ernst Troeltsch and Troeltsch’s friend Wilhelm Bousset. They all wrote about similarities between the ancient Hebrew prophets and comparable phenomena in other civilizations and used terms like “prophetic age” or “synchronistic age” to designate these similarities as the common features of a specific phase in world history. They were in turn influenced by important scholars

The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse

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from the field of religious studies (Hermann Siebeck) and Indology (Rhys Davids) so that one could already speak of an “Axial Age debate” around 1900.5 But all these authors were not the first debaters either. Jaspers himself mentioned two forerunners: the Sinologist Victor von Strauss and the classicist and philosopher Ernst von Lasaulx. While von Strauss had only a few words to say on this topic in his commentary on Lao Tse,6 Lasaulx truly developed at length the idea taken up by Jaspers in a remarkable and almost completely forgotten book of 1856, Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegründeten Philosophie der Geschichte.7 But Lasaulx himself also mentioned some forerunners,8 and at the moment it looks as if the earliest formulation of the Axial Age thesis is from Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805). He was a deeply Catholic and royalist French scholar who spent almost six years in India, wrote an empirically founded work on “oriental” forms of political rule, criticizing Montesquieu’s distorted ideas about oriental despotism, and studied the ancient Iranian religious traditions. He has long been considered one of the founders of Iranian studies. In the year 1771 he claimed that the ideas articulated by Zoroaster probably in the sixth century bce were part of a more general “revolution” in different parts of the world.9 I take it to be an empirical question whether even earlier formulations of this thesis will be found in the future. In any case, one must not assume that later authors were always influenced by earlier writers in this regard. But what exactly does the Axial Age thesis refer to—beyond an observation of a certain parallelism in the cultural transformation of four or five major civilizations between 800 and 200 bce? The best shorthand characterization is from the American Sinologist Benjamin Schwartz, who called the Axial Age “the age of transcendence”;10 it would perhaps be even more precise, although maybe a bit pedantic, to speak of the age of the emergence of the idea of transcendence. A cosmological chasm between a transcendental sphere and a mundane one is then seen as the defining characteristic of axiality. Others, for example Arnaldo Momigliano, speak of an “age of criticism”11 and emphasize the relativization of all mundane realities as the crucial feature of the age—an aspect that also plays the greatest role in Shmuel Eisenstadt’s sociological elaboration of the Axial Age thesis. The main emphasis in Eisenstadt’s work is on the desacralization of political domination that is a result of the emergence of transcendence, on the Axial Age as the

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origin of new forms of criticism, controversial claims about the true meaning of divine commandments, a growing separation between ethnic and religious collectivities, and a new historical dynamic. There is no serious contradiction between the two characterizations, but only a difference in emphasis. The emphasis is either on a profound transformation of religious presuppositions or on the social and political consequences of this religious transformation. But this image changes when the focus on “transcendence” itself is questioned. Björn Wittrock has explicitly denied the view that the Axial Age can be characterized by its reference to transcendence. He proposes to consider “an increasing reflexivity of human beings and their ability to overcome the bounds of a perceived inevitability of given conditions in temporal and social orderings” as its defining characteristic instead.12 For him it is a matter of context and contingency whether this transformation leads to a cosmology in terms of transcendence or immanence. Empirically, the most contentious case in this connection is ancient China.13 A similar view is expressed by Johann Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock in their introduction to a jointly edited volume when they call the “epoch-making innovation that gave rise to enduring civilizational identities as well as to religious visions of universal community” in the Axial Age the most striking manifestation of social creativity in human history.14 Creativity here, it seems to me, replaces the assumption of a divine revelation of truth without any further discussion. When Wittrock speaks of cases without a cosmology of transcendence, one could, of course, exclude them from the set of relevant cases and restrict the investigation to those in which the idea of transcendence did indeed play a role. What I am aiming at is the fact that all contributions to the Axial Age debate are permeated by assumptions about and attitudes toward religion. It is difficult to find a language for the transformations of the Axial Age that is neither bound to a specific religious faith nor to unreflected secularist premises. When I spoke of the “emergence” of the idea of transcendence, I chose this expression in order to avoid speaking either of its “discovery” or its “invention”—because “discovery” refers to an understanding of religious evolution that considers the Axial breakthrough as progress, whereas “invention” is a term that can only be plausible from a secularist perspective for the creative achievements of mankind in that period. Furthermore, if “transcendence” is not the defining characteristic of the Axial Age, a possible loss of transcendence in our

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age is much less dramatic, much less of a threat to moral universalism than if it is. A return to the original claims of the Axial Age can be seen as a prophetic plea for a forceful liberation from later attenuated versions of the fundamental impulses of post-Axial religion and of philosophy—or as a dangerous regression to obsolete fanaticisms. Not only can the different versions of the Axial Age be played out against one another: Athens or Jerusalem?—there can also be a nostalgia for pre-Axial myths and cosmologies or a radical modernism that sees the heritage of the Axial Age as a mere preparation for a modernity that is in its core independent from it. This affects the implicit views on our relationship to the Axial turn—whether we think of it in terms of replacement and supersession or in terms of addition and integration.15 We can use, therefore, the contributions to the Axial Age debate on the one hand as a probe to find out the tacit religious (or antireligious) assumptions in important theories of history and social change, and on the other as a means to provide contemporary debates about religion with additional material from history and sociology. This chapter restricts itself to three main contributors: Ernst von Lasaulx, Max Weber, and Karl Jaspers. It leaves out the oldest predecessors as well as Alfred Weber and Eric Voegelin (who had studied with Jaspers and Alfred Weber) and all contemporary figures.

I. Lasaulx’s Organicist Defense of Revelation Lasaulx’s name and work, once admired by great historians like Lord Acton and Jacob Burckhardt, are so completely forgotten today that it is probably appropriate to offer some biographical information about him first.16 Born in 1805 into an aristocratic German-speaking family of Luxemburgian origin, he had strong connections with several major figures of the conservativeCatholic milieu in nineteenth-century Bavaria. He was a student of Joseph Görres, the former Jacobin revolutionary, who had turned into the leading figure among Catholic intellectuals. Lasaulx was married to a daughter of Franz von Baader, another leading Catholic thinker of the time. As a young classicist he was invited to join the entourage of the Bavarian prince Otto when he became the first king of Greece after its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832. This brought him to Greece, and from there he traveled through the Middle East, returning with the deep conviction that Christianity can only be understood as the fusion of components from ancient

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Greece and ancient Judaism. For him Greek thinking appeared to be a kind of second, apocryphal Old Testament. When he returned to Germany, his academic career led to a professorial position at the University of Munich, where, among others, Lord Acton was one of his students. Interestingly, he also became involved in political matters, protesting against the Bavarian king when he tried to provide his lover—the dancer Lola Montez—with an aristocratic title; he was suspended from his academic position and became a member of the national assembly in Frankfurt during the revolution of 1848. His main scholarly ambition was to reconstitute a Christian perspective in the writing of universal history, and this in an age of an increasing nationalization of historiography. Until the seventeenth century such a Christian perspective had dominated historiography in Europe, but since then it had gradually lost out to a strict separation of empirically grounded historiography and a theological discourse about the history of salvation. Lasaulx and other romantic thinkers assumed that a new “organicist” understanding of history would enable them to revitalize the older unity of theology and historiography—not by a return, though, to dogmatic or biblically founded statements about history, but in an empirically defensible manner. The title of his main work of 1856, literally translated, is “A new attempt at an old philosophy of history, based on the truth of facts.” I interpret this title as referring to a new attempt indeed in an area that had been given up—an attempt “at an old philosophy of history,” and this in an empirically grounded manner. Lasaulx distinguished himself from other conservative Catholic thinkers of his time by going beyond an understanding of the teachings of the Catholic Church as revealed truth in opposition to all other versions of Christianity and all other religions. Instead, he defended an “inclusivist” understanding of religion in which all religions belong to one process of the religious development of mankind.17 Such an inclusivist understanding was the logical presupposition of an application of “organicist” metaphors or theorems to the history of religion. Lasaulx draws a strict parallel between the development of the individual and the development of whole peoples. For him religious faith is always the point of departure. A kind of adolescent doubt is a necessary but transitory phase, after which there are two possible outcomes: desperation or a reconciliation with faith. He extends the analogy to the point where a weakening of vitality, a process of aging, is considered

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to be as relevant for peoples as it is for individuals. This is also the reason why some have misleadingly called Lasaulx a kind of forerunner to Oswald Spengler’s speculations on history. This analogy also allows Lasaulx to interpret phenomena of secularization as indicators of a general “organismic” decline. For him religious indifference, a lack of respect with regard to the existing religious tradition, the reception of other forms of faith, the formation of sects, skepticism, or complete loss of faith are all called characteristic symptoms of degeneration, and he claims they can mostly be found among the higher and better educated strata, although he calls their representatives “Halbwisser.”18 According to Lasaulx, the immortality of the soul and the existence of divine entities become the object of intellectual speculations only when the original vitality, for which doubt in them is absurd, is being lost. Whereas the vital forces of a people believe in such a situation that the Gods have become angry at them or that humans have betrayed the Gods of their fathers, among the educated nothing but superstition survives. But this analogy of biological and religious evolution has a clear limitation in Lasaulx.19 Religion itself does not develop in accordance with the laws of organismic development. Religious institutions do not grow older and decay—on the contrary: while the Catholic Church had witnessed the emergence of the European dynasties, it will also—he speculates—be present at their demise and survive them. The main difference here between older theological views of history and Lasaulx’s new version is that he seems to exclude a religious revitalization of an aging people. In his framework, other peoples take over the role of major proponents of a particular faith, instilling it with new vitality. While these speculations may sound quite plausible today with regard to the globalization of Christianity (and, incidentally, the low fertility rates of secularized countries),20 their intellectual foundation is obviously very shaky. But the “inclusivist” and “developmentalist” understanding of religion and its relationship to philosophy predisposes Lasaulx to go beyond a culturalist understanding of the emergence of Greek philosophy. It is in immediate connection with the passages that describe the parallels between the adolescence of individuals and that of peoples that he clearly spells out the Axial Age thesis avant la lettre: “It can by no means be coincidental that at about the same time, 600 before Christ, there appear in Persia Zoroaster, in India Gautama Buddha, in China Confucius, among the Jews the prophets, in Rome the king Numa and in Hellas

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the first philosophers . . . as reformers of popular religion; this remarkable coincidence can have its foundation only in the inner substantial unity of mankind and the life of peoples . . . , not in the particular effervescence of one national spirit.”21 It would seem as if Jaspers had directly taken it up from here. Jesus Christ is, for Lasaulx, the most important of the heroes of human history; but for him not only Moses participates in the history of revelation and salvation, but also Socrates, Buddha, Zoroaster, and others. There is a subterranean move in Lasaulx from the observation of parallels between the Judeo-Christian history of salvation and other religious breakthroughs to a merely hero-centered view of history. In his book he gives a long list of such heroes, which includes almost contemporary figures like Hamann, Kant, Goethe, Gluck, Mozart, and, unsurprisingly, Görres. This intellectual move did not remain unnoticed by the Catholic Church. A few years after its publication, his book was put on the index of prohibited writings. Lasaulx died in 1861 and did not live to see his writings classified as heretic. He seems to have been willing to submit to such a verdict. But whatever his personal reaction would have been, the decision of the Congregation of the Index was a fatal blow for his work because it led to its complete neglect in Catholic circles, while it was perceived as overly Catholic and reactionary among liberal historians and philosophers.22 Even liberal Catholics, however, like the great Church historian Ignaz von Döllinger, distanced themselves from Lasaulx because of his leveling of the difference between Christ’s role in salvation and a mere secular understanding of religious history. Characteristically, resurrection and the expectation of Christ’s coming again did not play a role in Lasaulx’s philosophy of history. But one could also turn this judgment around. Whereas the pope and the Catholic theologians of the time perceived the difference between the official doctrine of the Church and Lasaulx’s speculations—and they were undoubtedly correct in this regard—one could also see Lasaulx’s book as an attempt to reintegrate the history of religion with religious discourse in a way that is similar to the intellectual path Troeltsch was to take later. The parallels between different “world religions” have been and must continue to be a challenge for all religious believers, but also for secular minds. The question of “revelation” cannot simply be put to rest. It is the problem of one or several revelations, and the problem of revelation in the perspective of

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philosophy that Lasaulx had touched upon. This is the point where Jaspers, coming from a totally different background and pursuing his own philosophical project, would take up the thread from Lasaulx almost a century later.

II. Max Weber’s Reductionist View of Sacramental Experience Although he never used the expression “Axial Age,” Max Weber has to figure prominently in any serious reconstruction of this debate. There is a brief passage in the subchapter on prophets of the “sociology of religion” chapter in Economy and Society where Weber refers to Greek and Indian parallels to the Hebrew prophets—probably under the influence of Bousset, but without mentioning him at this point;23 there is also a famous footnote in Weber’s study on Hinduism with an additional reference to China and a refutation of Eduard Meyer’s “strange” (as Weber says) attempt to find a biological explanation of this coincidence.24 But much more relevant than these brief passages is the fact that Weber’s whole analysis of the role of the prophets plays such an important role in his understanding of the history of religion. It is not an exaggeration to say that for Weber the prophets or the prophetic age constitute the crucial event in the history of religion—the turning point between tens of thousands of years of “magical” religion and the new age of postmagical “salvation religions.” In the last few decades we have witnessed an enormous output of research on the sources of Weber’s analyses, on his specific achievements, and on the empirical adequacy of his views.25 It obviously does not make sense to even try to characterize this literature here; in our context, I will restrict myself to one single point that is, however, at least in my eyes, of enormous strategic importance for the reevaluation of Weber’s contribution. The point I have in mind is Weber’s understanding of what “sacraments” are, what their relationship to magic is, and what their role in the modern age could be. Are sacraments the mere post-Axial equivalents of magic or are they radically different from everything pre-Axial? In large parts of the secondary literature on Weber26 one can find a sharp contrast between the writings on the history of religion that formed the backdrop to Weber’s work and his own writings. Whereas the writings of other late-nineteenth-century German scholars are often characterized— and rightly so—as biased in favor of Protestant Christianity according to

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which Protestant Christianity is the highest and final point of religious evolution, Weber’s own work is seen as free from such inclinations, as a sober and historically extremely well-informed sociologically oriented systematization and conceptual clarification of a huge amount of material from the global history of religion. Against this widespread view, my claim is that even the so-called chapter on “sociology of religion”—that is, the text on “Religious Communities”—and the famous “Zwischenbetrachtung” (“Intermediate Reflections”) in Weber’s comparative studies have a latent narrative structure. For the story that is contained in this text a certain view of Calvinist Protestantism, its past and its future, is absolutely constitutive. And, of course, a certain view of the given superiority of the “West.” Others have argued before that Weber’s purpose in his comparative research was not so much “a broad comparative analysis per se, but rather to discover, in the study of non-European contexts, points of comparison to ‘our occidental cultural religions.’ Weber had a certain view of the uniqueness of the West that has to be called extremely problematical, if not untenable according to our current knowledge, for example, about China,”27 and that has become less and less plausible even for the superficial observer because of the economic transformation of Asia in our time. I am mentioning this argument because it bolsters my claim of a narrative structure in Weber that should be made visible so that it can be critically evaluated. This narrative structure is of enormous importance for Weber’s assumptions about nonascetic Protestantism and about China, but above all about Catholicism. Perhaps the shortest way to make clear what I have in mind is to draw attention to the hyphen between magic and sacramental that one finds so frequently in Weber’s work: “magical-sacramental.” On the analytical level, the distinction between magic and sacramental, between human attempts to use superhuman forces for their own purposes (“magic”) and a willingness to serve God and to open oneself up to the mundane presence of the transcendent (“sacramental”), is absolutely crucial—and Weber is very well aware of that. Weber also points out that—sociologically—the contrast is often blurred.28 And there is no doubt that this is to some extent empirically correct. The “demagicization” of religion is a long process that started in the Axial Age, but certainly did not end then.29 It had and has to be achieved again and again whenever a post-Axial religion was or is transferred

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to a pre-Axial culture as, for example, in the Christianization of Europe. But if we pay attention not just to the explicit definitions in Weber’s work but also—in a “deconstructive” way—to his examples and asides, we realize that his text is shot through with remarks about Catholicism that reduce Catholic practices, if not doctrines, to pure magic. Right at the beginning of the text on “Religious Communities” he mentions southern Europeans spitting at the image of a saint if the expected result does not come about; no church doctrine, no declaration of a church council that distinguishes between the adoration of God and the mere veneration of a saint, does help here, Weber claims.30 While this certainly is a realistic description of features in the world of popular Catholicism, there are many other passages where Weber—and not the theologically uneducated religious practitioner—is responsible for blurring the relevant distinction. For Weber, the Catholic priest during the Mass and in absolving from sins seems to be a magician.31 Weber observes that in the Catholic Mass the sermon plays a smaller role than in Protestant ser vices and sees in this fact the inverse proportionality of magic and ethical teaching.32 The sacrament of the Eucharist, the physical fusion with the divine body of Christ, is explicitly called “essentially magical” by Weber.33 Most readers of Weber’s texts today are probably not even aware of the fact that these statements sound like insults to Catholic ears. They may have internalized a Protestant image of Catholicism, or as secularists they may consider these denominational differences to be mere hairsplitting. They therefore don’t realize that Weber’s seemingly value-neutral characterizations are in direct continuity with Protestant anti-Catholic polemics from the time of the Reformation on. In other contexts, Weber even goes so far as to describe Catholicism as a form of polytheism. Weber’s understanding of monotheism was neither based on an appropriate view of trinitarian doctrine nor of the cult of canonized saints, who certainly cannot be seen as “independent deities who have undergone a semi-involution.”34 It is not necessary to go into greater detail here. My point is not that Weber had an overly positive image of Protestantism—he detested Lutheranism and was deeply ambivalent about Calvinism—but that his analysis has a narrative structure and is couched in temporal categories like “disenchantment” and “rationalization” that are only seemingly neutral. While the notion of “rationalization” had not been a driving force for Weber’s analyses from the beginning but had

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only gradually emerged in his thinking as a conceptual roof under which he could store his various diverging investigations and therefore had to cover so many different phenomena that I often have difficulties seeing what their common denominator allegedly is, the meaning of “disenchantment” seems to me to be clear: it is certainly not—as has frequently been assumed— secularization (whatever that exactly means), but “demagicization,” a process that occurs when processes in the world lose their “magical meaning”; they happen but do not “mean” anything.35 By construing the sacraments and the human experience connected with them as quasi-magical, as remnants of or relapses into the world of magic, Weber treats Catholicism, and to a certain extent even Lutheranism, as pre-Axial and excludes it from any claim to being a serious contemporary option. For him all religions demand at some point a sacrifice of the intellect,36 and Catholicism to a particular degree. We should not forget that this was written at a time when Catholic modernism played an important role in international intellectual debates and when the so-called liturgical movement was about to emerge. Even in the “Zwischenbetrachtung,” which can be read as a mere typology of conflicts between value spheres and religious orientations, Weber makes claims about the inner consistency of religious orientations that should not be taken at face value. For him it is either Puritanism with its belief in the predestination of salvation or an “acosmistic” ethos of fraternity as in India that is fully consistent; everything else for him is mere compromise or lack of clarity and self-reflection. But this view, which is presented as the result of a purely rational schematization of options, is based on a problematic understanding of the relationship between religious experience and intellectual treatments of the problems of theodicy;37 it thus misses the inner consistency of an understanding of religion based on “sacramental experience”38 and the radical transformation of religious experience in the framework of post-Axial religion, and therefore distorts the range of options under contemporary conditions. An interpretation of Weber’s sociology of religion as it is proposed here helps to reembed Weber in his intellectual milieu; many of his pronouncements lose their canonical character. They can be seen again as depending on the specific views of his sources of information and as contributing to a scholarly, but also to a quasi-religious discourse. It fits with attempts, for example, to show how much Weber’s overly sharp distinction between Lu-

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theranism and Calvinism with regard to their political implications is a result of interconfessional Protestant polemics within Protestantism in German nineteenth-century theology.39 Eckart Otto in his turn has compared the understanding of the Hebrew prophets in Weber’s and Troeltsch’s thinking and demonstrated that—despite certain similarities—their deep-seated motivations were different and not without influence on their conclusions. “When E. Troeltsch characterizes theodicy as ‘practical’ which means that explanation is not in the centre of prophetic interest because the prophets do not want ‘to explain destiny, but to bring about a practical decision and attitude’ (Troeltsch), then this dialectic of inner experience and post factum reflection in E. Troeltsch is directed against rationalist misinterpretations of the role of the prophets. In Max Weber, however, the goal is to demonstrate the ‘purely religious’ motivation and political and economic independence of the prophets and to mark the point where charisma is transformed in the process of rationalization and ‘Veralltäglichung.’ ” 40 Troeltsch’s analysis of the role of the Hebrew prophets was an attempt to learn from a historical case how a religious tradition can be renewed in a time of crisis, whereas Weber looked at the formative influences a religion could have on economic, social, and political processes and the effect these processes can have on religion. Both research programs are, of course, legitimate. But the differences between them are connected with crucial differences in their diagnoses of contemporary religion. Whereas both Troeltsch and Weber came to the conclusion that Puritanism was exhausted, this meant for Weber that the most consistent form of Christianity had reached its end, while for Troeltsch (and myself) this meant that other forms of Christianity—both doctrinally and institutionally—would be important in the future. A powerful role of the post-Axial religions in the contemporary world can probably not be articulated in Weber’s theoretical framework. This, however, is not an empi